The Anna Pigeon mystery series
By Nevada Barr
Track of the Cat [1993]
Firestorm [1996]
Anna Pigeon has fled New York and her
memories to find work as a ranger in the
country's national parks. In the remote
backcountry of West Texas, however, she
discovers murder and violence. Fellow park
ranger Sheila Drury is mysteriously killed, presumably by a
mountain lion. But the deep claw marks Anna finds across
Drury's throat and the paw prints surrounding the body are
too perfect to be real. Suspicious from the start and eager
to prevent the needless slaughter of her beloved cougars,
Anna can't let the matter rest. The disappearance of
another ranger and the frightening reality of a hiking
"accident" of her own convince Anna that something is very
wrong. Following a trail with few leads, Anna must confront
the dark side of the desert. As she comes closer to the
truth, she realizes that whatever is stalking the land she
loves is now stalking her as well.
 Winner of the Agatha Award for Best First Novel
 Winner of the Anthony Award for Best First Novel
A raging fire in California's Lassen Volcanic
National Park traps firefighters and Ranger
Anna Pigeon. Afterward, Anna discovers
two from her group have been killed – one
a victim of the flames, the other stabbed to
death. Now, as a rampaging winter storm descends, Anna
must uncover a murderer.
 Nominee for the Anthony Award
A Superior Death [1994]
Below the frigid waters of Lake Superior lies
a sunken 1927 wreck -- the final resting
place of its five victims. But when divers
surface with a tale of seeing a sixth body,
National Parks Service ranger Anna Pigeon
must break the lake's grip on its icy secrets.
Ill Wind [1995]
It is whispered that the Old Ones still haunt
Mesa Verde – the restless spirits of the
Anasazi, who carved their homes in the
mountain's face eight centuries ago ... and
then disappeared from the Earth. Newly
assigned National Parks ranger Anna Pigeon seeks solace
from her own personal demons in the ancient cave
dwellings of a vanished Native American civilization. But an
inexplicable illness affecting visitors to the popular
Colorado landmark has dragged her from her reverie – as
have two mysterious tragedies: the death of a child ... and
the murder of a friend. And now she must find the very
human source of the evil wind that is blowing through the
ruins. For it threatens more innocent lives, Mother Nature
... and Anna herself.
Endangered Species [1997]
Cumberland Island, off the coast of
Georgia, is a breathtaking setting for
tedious fire pre-suppression duty. But
Anna’s boring routine is shattered when
two men die in a plane crash, victims of
sabotage.
Blind Descent [1998]
Anna Pigeon faces personal demons as
well as life-threatening dangers in an
untamed underground wilderness for
which neither training nor her love of the
outdoors has prepared her. Lechuguilla
Cavern is a man-eating cave discovered in New Mexico's
Carlsbad Caverns National Park in the mid-1980s.
Estimated to extend for more than three hundred miles,
only ninety of them mapped, the cave was formed by acid
burning away the limestone; corridors, pits, cramped
wormholes, cliffs and splendid rooms the size of football
fields tangle together in a maze shrouded in the utter
darkness of the underground. When a fellow ranger is
injured in a caving accident, Anna swallows her paralyzing
fear of small spaces and descends into Lechuguilla to help
a friend in need. Worse than the claustrophobia that
haunts her are the signs – some natural, and some, more
ominously, man-made – that not everyone is destined to
emerge from this wondrous living tomb. All the skills Anna
has honed in the terrestrial world are called into play on
precipitous climbs, exhausting treks, and descents into
canyons that have never seen the sun. The terrain is alien
and hostile, the greed and destructive powers of mankind
all too familiar. In this place of internal terrors, Anna must
learn whom she can trust, and, in the end, decide who is to
live and who is to die.
 Nominee for the Anthony Award
 Nominee for the Macavity Award
Liberty Falling [1999]
When Anna Pigeon left New York City after
her husband was killed, she hoped it would
be forever. But now her sister Molly is
clinging to life in an uptown hospital ICU,
so Anna has reluctantly returned. Rooming
with a friend and fellow park ranger in close quarters on
Liberty Island – the small strip of land that is home to Lady
Liberty – Anna spends her free time exploring the grand
monument and the crumbling, overgrown, and eerie ruins
in the unrestored sections of nearby Ellis Island. But the
peace she seeks here is shattered when she finds herself
among a crowd gathered at the Lady's base, staring at the
broken body of a teenager who fell – or was pushed – to
her death.
Deep South [2000]
Anna Pigeon finally gives in to her
bureaucrat clock and signs on for a
promotion. Next thing she knows, she's
knee-deep in mud and Mississippi. Almost
immediately, as the new district ranger on the Natchez
Trace, Anna discovers the body of a young prom queen
near a country cemetery, a sheet around her head, and a
noose around her neck. It's a bizarre twist on a bestforgotten past of frightening racial undertones. As fast as
the ever-encroaching kudzu vines of the region, the roots of
this story run deep – and threaten to suffocate anyone in
the way, including Anna.
 Nominee for the Anthony Award
Blood Lure [2001]
Anna Pigeon, park ranger and fortyish
heroine is back. Anna has been assigned
to work on a scientific project that has her
hanging out bait of blood and guts to
attract the big grizzlies in Glacier National Park. When a
body turns up in a remote corner of the park, and it
becomes clear that death was met at the hands of a
human rather that the claws of a grizzly, Anna goes on the
hunt for a killer.
Hunting Season [2002]
When Anna answers a call to historic Mt.
Locust, once a producing plantation and
inn on Mississippi's Natchez Trace Parkway
and now a tourist spot, the last thing she
expects to encounter is murder. But the man Anna finds in
the stand's old bedroom is no tourist in distress. He's nearly
naked, and very dead, his body bearing marks consistent
with an S&M ritual gone awry. On a writing table nearby is
an open Bible, ominous passages circled in red. It seems
the deceased is the brother of Raymond Barnette, local
undertaker and a candidate for sheriff, who wants to keep
any hint of kinkiness out of the minds of the God-fearing
populace. Ray may be hiding a house full of secrets in the
old family homestead, but before Anna can start her
investigation, she's waylaid by malevolent poachers,
peevish coworkers, and a suddenly turbulent romantic life.
And when hidden agendas and old allegiances are
revealed, it's suddenly Anna's life that's on the line.
Flashback [2003]
Running from a proposal of marriage from
Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon takes a
post as a temporary supervisory ranger on
remote Garden Key in Dry Tortugas National
Park, a small grouping of tiny islands in a
natural harbor seventy miles off Key West. This island
paradise has secrets it would keep; not just in the present,
but in shadows from its gritty past, when it served as a
prison for the Lincoln conspirators during and after the Civil
War. Here, on this last lick of the United States, in a giant
crumbling fortress, Anna has little company except for the
occasional sunburned tourist or unruly shrimper. When her
sister, Molly, sends her a packet of letters from a greatgreat-aunt who lived at the fort with her husband, a career
soldier, Anna's fantasy life is filled with visions of this longago time. When a mysterious boat explosion – and the
discovery of unidentifiable body parts – keeps her
anchored to the present, Anna finds crimes of past and
present closing in on her. A tangled web that was woven
before she arrived begins to threaten her sanity and her
life. Cut off from the mainland by miles of water, poor
phone service, and sketchy radio contact, and aided by one
law-enforcement ranger, Anna must find answers or
weather a storm to rival the hurricanes for which the
islands are famous.
High Country [2004]
It's fall in the Sierra Mountains, and Anna
Pigeon is slinging hash in Yosemite
National Park's historic Ahwahnee Hotel.
Four young people, all seasonal park
employees, have disappeared, and two
weeks of work by crack search-and-rescue teams have
failed to turn up a single clue; investigators are unsure as
to whether the four went AWOL for reasons of their own –
or died in the park. Needing an out-of-park ranger to work
undercover, Anna is detailed to dining-room duty; but after
a week of waiting tables, she knows the missing employees
are only the first indications of a sickness threatening the
park. Her twenty-something roommates give up their partygirl ways and panic; her new restaurant colleagues regard
her with suspicion and fear. But when Anna's life is
threatened and her temporary supervisor turns a deaf ear,
she follows the scent of evil, taking a solo hike up a snowy
trial to the high country, seeking answers. What waits for
her is a nightmare of death and greed – and perhaps her
final adventure.
Hard Truth [2005]
Just three days after her wedding to
Sheriff Paul Davidson, Anna Pigeon moves
from Mississippi to Colorado to assume
her new post as district ranger at Rocky
Mountain National Park, where three
young girls have disappeared during a religious retreat. Two
of the children emerge a month later, clad only in filthy
underwear and claiming to remember nothing of the
intervening weeks. The girls are traumatized but forge a
bond with the pair of campers who discovered them – a
wheelchair-bound paraplegic and her elderly aunt. With the
reappearance of the children comes an odd and unsettling
presence in the park, a sense of disembodied evil and
unspeakable terror: small animals are mercilessly
slaughtered and a sinister force seems to still control the
girls. As Anna investigates, she finds herself caught up in
the machinations of a paranoid religious sect determined to
keep their secrets and the girls sequestered from law
enforcement and psychiatric help. Following the trails of the
many suspects, especially that of the cult's intense youth
group leader, Anna discovers the force which has destroyed
the children's minds. Here in the park, evil has the eyes of a
visionary and the soul of the devil. Anna will discover the
truth – even if it kills her.
Winter Study [2008]
It is January, and Park Ranger Anna Pigeon is
sent to Isle Royale in Lake Superior to learn
about managing and understanding wolves,
as her home base of Rocky Mountain
National Park might soon have their own pack of the
magnificent, much-maligned animals. She’s housed in the
island’s bunkhouse with the famed wolf study team, along
with two scientists from Homeland Security, who are
assessing the study with an eye to opening the park each
winter — effectively bringing an end to the fifty-year study —
so that it can be manned to secure the scrap of border with
Canada. Soon after Anna’s arrival, the wolf packs under
observation begin to act in peculiar ways. Giant wolf prints
are found, and Anna spies the form of a great wolf from a
surveillance plane. The discovery of wolf scat containing
alien DNA leads the team to believe that perhaps a
wolf/dog hybrid has been introduced to the island. When a
female member of the team is savaged, Anna is convinced
she is being stalked, and what was once a beautiful, idyllic
refuge becomes a place of unnatural occurrences and
danger beyond the ordinary. Alone on an island without
electricity or running water, with temperatures hovering
around zero both day and night, Anna fights not only for the
wolves, but for also her own survival.
Borderline [2009]
The killings on Isle Royale have left Anna
drained and haunted, her memories of her
time with the wolf study group forever
marred by the carnage on the island.
Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, she is on
administrative leave, per her superintendent's urging. Anna
wonders if the leave might not be permanent, either by her
own choice or that of the National Park Service. The one
bright spot in Anna's life is Paul, her husband of less than a
year. Hoping the warmth and the adventure of a raft trip in
Big Bend National Park will lift her spirits, Paul takes Anna
to southwest Texas, where the sun is hot and the Rio
Grande is running high. The sheer beauty of the
Chihuahuan Desert and the power of the river work their
magic – until the raft is lost in the rapids and a young
college student falls overboard, resulting in an even more
grisly discovery. Caught in a strainer between two boulders
and more dead than alive, is a pregnant woman, hair and
arms tangled in the downed branches. Instead of the soulsoothing experience they'd longed for, Anna and Paul find
themselves sucked into a labyrinth of intrigue that leads
from the Mexican desert to the steps of the Governor's
Mansion in Austin, Texas.
Burn [2010]
As she recovers from the trauma of the past
couple of months, National Park Service
Ranger Anna Pigeon visits an old friend in
New Orleans. She's not in town long when
she crosses paths with a creepy guy who
apparently attempts to put a curse on her, and she begins
to slowly find traces of very dark doings in the heart of postKatrina New Orleans.
Nevada Barr is also the author of three additional books,
not in the Anna Pigeon series, including 13 ½ -- a standalone thriller also set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Prepared for the Just Desserts mystery fiction group
Lincoln City Libraries – Lincoln, Nebraska
http://www.lincolnlibraries.org
July 2010 – sdc/bmpl